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‘La bonita confiancita’: Deception, Trust and the Figure of Poetry in La gitanilla

2011; Routledge; Volume: 88; Issue: 7-8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820.2011.620301

1478-3428

Edwin Williamson,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

Abstract Traditional readings of La gitanilla as an idealizing romance have been challenged by scholars who point to ‘subversive’ elements in the novel. But it is possible to resolve this difference by re-examining the commonplace view of Preciosa as a figure of poetry. Although she is portrayed as both ‘desenvuelta’ and ‘honesta’, this paradox does not produce a contradiction because the narrative describes a process whereby Preciosa is transformed from a deceptive gypsy, who uses her talents for mercenary ends, into an ideal embodiment of beauty and truth. The turning-point is the emergence of a bond of trust between the girl and the two rivals for her love; only then does the picaresque ethos of the gypsy world yield abruptly to the procedures of romance. In this perspective, the action of La gitanilla acquires a metafictional significance which sheds light on Cervantes’ ideas on the nature of his creative activity. He draws on both romance and the picaresque in order to address the Platonist issue of the ‘lie’ of art, and has recourse to the notion of trust between author and reader in order to defend his belief that literature can overcome deception and convey a form of truth. Notes 3Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edición del Instituto Cervantes dirigida por Francisco Rico, 2 vols (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores/Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2005), II, xvi, 825. Further references to Don Quijote are given in parentheses in the main text. 1This view is so commonly stated that references are too numerous to list, but see the following representative examples: Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de las ‘Novelas ejemplares’ (Madrid: Gredos, 1974 [1st ed. 1943]), 58; Karl-Ludwig Selig, ‘Concerning the Structure of Cervantes’ La Gitanilla’, Romantisches Jahrbuch, 13 (1962), 273–76; Georges Güntert, ‘La gitanilla y la poética de Cervantes’, BRAE, 52 (1972), 109; Ruth El Saffar, Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’ ‘Novelas ejemplares’ (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1974), 101–02; Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, ‘La gitanilla’, Cervantes, I (1981), 9–17 (p. 14); Alban K. Forcione, ‘Cervantes’ La Gitanilla as Erasmian Romance’, in Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1982), 215–22; Stanislav Zimic, Las ‘Novelas ejemplares’ de Cervantes (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1996), 12; María Antonia Garcés, ‘Poetic Language and the Dissolution of the Subject in La gitanilla and El Licenciado Vidriera’, Calíope, 2 (1996), 85–104. 2Miguel de Cervantes, La gitanilla, in Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge García López (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), 27–108 (p. 60). Further references are given in the main text. 4On the role of money and commerce, see Harry Sieber's introduction to his edition, Novelas ejemplares, 2 vols (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981), Vol. I; Robert ter Horst, ‘Une Saison en enfer: La gitanilla’, Cervantes, V (1985), 87–127; Joan Ramón Resina, ‘Laissez-faire y reflexividad erótica en La gitanilla’, Modern Language Notes, 106 (1991), 257–78; William H. Clamurro, Beneath the Fiction: The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes's ‘Novelas ejemplares’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 18–24; and Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000), 93–114. 5Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘La buenaventura de Preciosa’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 34 (1985–86), 741–68, has studied this aspect of the novel and its satirical attributes. 6See, for example, Casalduero, Sentido y forma de las ‘Novelas ejemplares’, 56–77; Selig, ‘Concerning the Structure of Cervantes’ La Gitanilla’; Güntert, ‘La gitanilla y la poética de Cervantes’; Jennifer Lowe, Cervantes: Two ‘Novelas Ejemplares’, ‘La gitanilla’, ‘La ilustre fregona’ (London: Grant and Cutler, 1971); El Saffar, Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’ ‘Novelas ejemplares’, 101–02; Frank Pierce, ‘La Gitanilla: A Tale of High Romance,’ BHS, LIV:4 (1977), 283–95; Avalle-Arce, ‘La gitanilla’; Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 93–223. 7See E. Michael Gerli, ‘Romance and Novel: Idealism and Irony in La gitanilla’, Cervantes, 6 (1986), 29–38, and ‘A Novel Rewriting: Romance and Irony in La gitanilla’, in Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995), 24–39; Lesley Lipson ‘ “La palabra hecha nada”: Mendacious Discourse in La gitanilla’, Cervantes, 9 (1989), 35–53; Clamurro, Beneath the Fiction, 15–40; Alison Weber, ‘Pentimento: The Parodic Text of La gitanilla’, Hispanic Review, 62:1 (1994), 59–75; and Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World, 93–114. 8Cervantes’ depiction of the gypsies has been much studied. See, for example, Luis Rosales, Cervantes y la libertad, 2 vols (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1960), I, 297–304; Lowe, Cervantes: Two ‘Novelas Ejemplares’, 37–39; and Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 184–92, who drew attention to their ambivalent portrayal. 9Avalle-Arce observed that ‘para el lector del siglo XVII La gitanilla tiene arranque de novela picaresca’ (‘La gitanilla’, 11). 10Covarrubias defines ensalmo as follows: ‘Cierto modo de curar con oraciones’, and further points out that ‘ensalmar a uno, a veces sinifica descalabrarle, porque tiene necesidad de que le aten alguna venda a la cabeza, de las cuales suelen usar los ensalmadores, bendiciéndolas primero y haciendo con ellas ciertas cruces sobre la parte llagada o herida’. See Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, edición integral e ilustrada de Ignacio Arellano y Rafael Zafra (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006), 789. 11For Luis Rosales, Andrés’ sojourn with the gypsies is ‘un rito de purificación’ and Preciosa's intention ‘es espiritualizar la inclinación’ of her admirer (Cervantes y la libertad, I, 308; italicized in the original). 12See El Saffar, Novel to Romance, 97; Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 94; Lipson, ‘ “La palabra hecha nada” ’, 40–45; and Clamurro, Beneath the Fiction, 26–29. 13Lipson, ‘ “La palabra hecha nada” ’, 48. 14See Gerli, ‘Romance and Novel’, 37; Theresa Anne Sears, A Marriage of Convenience: Ideal and Ideology in the ‘Novelas ejemplares’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 141; Weber, ‘Pentimento: The Parodic Text of La gitanilla’, 72; and Clamurro, Beneath the Fiction, 32–40. 15Robert M. Johnston, ‘Picaresque and Pastoral in La ilustre fregona’, in Cervantes and the Renaissance, ed. Michael McGaha (Easton: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980), 167–75, showed that Cervantes at times combines the conventions of the pastoral genre with those of the picaresque in order to create something entirely new (167). 16See Edwin Williamson, ‘Challenging the Hierarchies: The Interplay of Romance and the Picaresque in La ilustre fregona’, in Cervantes: Essays in Memory of E. C. Riley on the Quatercentenary of ‘Don Quijote’, ed., with an intro., by Jeremy Robbins and Edwin Williamson, BSS, LXXXI:4–5 (2004), 655–74 (pp. 672–73). 17Cervantes does something similar in the dénouement of La ilustre fregona. See Williamson, ‘Challenging the Hierarchies’, 668–69. 18I believe Cervantes implicitly offers the reader a similar choice in El amante liberal by playing ironically with the verisimilitude of the romance. See Edwin Williamson, ‘Hacia la conciencia ideológica de Cervantes: idealización y violencia en El amante liberal’, in Cervantes. Estudios en la víspera de su centenario, ed. Kurt Reichenberger (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994), 519–33. 19Cervantes, El coloquio de los perros, in Novelas ejemplares, ed. García López, 623. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Edwin Williamson, ‘El juego de la verdad en El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros’, in Actas del Segundo Coloquio Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas, Alcalá de Henares, 1989 (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991), 183–99, and ‘Cervantes as Moralist and Trickster: The Critique of Picaresque Autobiography in El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros’, in Essays on Hispanic Themes in Honour of Edward C. Riley, ed. Jennifer Lowe and Philip Swanson (Edinburgh: Dept of Hispanic Studies, Univ. of Edinburgh, 1989), 104–26.